Update with new details: Alabama man cops to killing wife 30 years ago in New York mountains

View full size(New York State Police Photo)June Marion Collard: Went missing in 1980 from her Olmstedville, N.Y. home in Minerva. This week, her husband, Thomas A. Collard, 62, of Samson, Ala., was arrested after confessing to killing her.

RAY BROOK, N.Y. -- An Alabama man whose wife disappeared 30 years ago in mountainous northern New York admitted that he killed his spouse and told investigators where they should look for her remains, state police said Wednesday.

Thomas Collard, 62, of Samson, Ala., was being flown back to New York to face a charge of second-degree murder in the death of June Collard, a 30-year-old mother of three when she went missing on Nov. 25, 1980.

Samson is in the Wiregrass region of southeast Alabama, just north of the Florida state line.

State police Capt. Robert LaFountain said Collard was charged after telling cold case investigators Tuesday, who followed leads to Florida and Alabama, that he left his wife's body near Olmstedville, an Adirondacks community about 80 miles north of Albany.

Collard told police when he reported her missing that he thought she'd left him for another man.

LaFountain said police weren't saying what led them back to Collard. But "We're definitely glad we got the break we needed in the case," he said.

Collard waived his right to an extradition hearing in Alabama and was expected be arraigned Wednesday evening in Essex County in New York. It wasn't immediately known if he had a lawyer.

Police didn't immediately release information on how or why June Collard was killed.

Tammy Vanderwerker, the couple's daughter, told the Glens Falls Post Star she believed her father was responsible because of comments he made when she was a child. She would phone him every few years asking him to confess to the killing.

"I told him I want to know the truth. Tell me what you did," the Warrensburg woman said.

Collard denied involvement each time.

Vanderwerker was 8 years old when her mother disappeared. She said she had planned a trip to talk to her father several weeks ago, but investigators asked her not to go.

Without elaborating, she said she went to state police nearly 16 years ago with information that led to the reopening of what had been a missing person's case.

"The sad thing is we've known it for 30 years, but couldn't prove it," she said.

Vanderwerker said she fondly recalls her mother.

"She made our clothes for us. She was always there for us," she said. "She was not a woman to just take off and leave."